High School Nurse's Motto Is Expect The Unexpected

Students' Needs Not Always Confined To Medicine

Nancy Cassidy thought being the mother of four active children had trained her to be flexible. Then she became a school nurse.

She found that "expect the unexpected" should be the official motto for school nurses, she says.

"You never know what's going to happen," says Cassidy, who has been school nurse at Rich South High School, Richton Park, since August 1994. A new day can bring anything from a student fainting in class to a mini-epidemic of stomach flu.

Although the majority of her time is spent dealing with minor health problems, such as sprained ankles, she can find herself face-to-face with more serious ailments, such as diabetes, asthma, bulimia and depression.

She also has a couple of hypochondriacs who visit her four-room office regularly.

"One of those kids came in once and said, `I have hypothermia,' " she recalls with a smile. "Your hypochondriacs really know their medical terminology."

At school, Cassidy functions much like a triage nurse in a hospital emergency room, diagnosing the severity of a patient's medical problem to ensure that serious problems get immediate aid and that all injuries and illnesses get appropriate treatment. Depending on the problem, she may send a student back to class or home with a parent, or she may call in paramedics for a hurried trip to an emergency room. Twice this school year, she has sent students to the hospital for problems with asthma.

"Luckily, the parents here are very good," she says. "If I send a child home, usually the next day he'll come back to school having seen a doctor."

Stomachaches are the most common complaint Cassidy hears.

"When these kids have stomachaches, usually it's stress-related," she says. "Adolescents worry about everything--their friends, their classes, their jobs. A lot of times we'll talk, and they'll say, `My mom says I worry too much.' So I'll ask them, `What do you think you can do about that problem?' Making them develop an answer is part of helping them become independent and self-directed."

Cassidy has seen about 300 of the school's 1,200 students often enough to know their names. There are about 50 with chronic health problems, such as asthma, whom she sees regularly.

But there are some, such as senior Michelle Petersen, who have gotten to know Cassidy and drop by her first-floor office more for moral support than medical advice.

"If I have a problem, I'll come to talk to her because she's a good listener," says Petersen, 18. "She helps me with a lot of stuff other people don't pay attention to."

Cassidy admits that some students need her more for her mothering skills than her nursing knowledge.

"I feel like I'm a mom here," she says. "Adolescents want to be treated with respect. That means trying to listen to everything they say, just letting them talk. A lot of these kids call me `Mama Cassidy.' "

"Her mothering skills mean a lot," Assistant Principal Margurite Martin agrees. "Some of these kids need somebody in the building who's not bound by a schedule, who doesn't need to be in a class in two minutes. They need someplace (where) they can just walk in and get some attention. Kids today can have a lot of life experience but still be very needy emotionally."

Martin points out that Cassidy and her husband, Scott, came in one weekend to redecorate the nurse's office because Cassidy wanted a less sterile environment. They repainted the office in pastel colors and put family photos on the wall as well as a series of posters about the effects of various drugs on the body.

"She's physically created a health center that is very inviting for young people," Martin says. "They feel very comfortable in there."

Cassidy, 37, is a certified school nurse, which means she has a teaching certificate in addition to her nursing degree. She received the certificate in 1994 from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A native of Chicago's Mt. Greenwood neighborhood, she graduated from Mother Macauley High School in 1976 and attended the Evangelical School of Nursing at Christ Hospital, Oak Lawn, where she received her nursing diploma in 1979. She completed her bachelor's degree in nursing at Elmhurst College in 1983.

Cassidy, who married in 1979, spent 15 years as a staff nurse at Christ Hospital, working in the special care nursery and labor and delivery, before coming to Rich South. She and her family have lived in Orland Park since 1991.

She became interested in nursing as a young girl, reading the Cherry Ames books, a series of stories about a nurse. Her interest in becoming a school nurse grew directly out of the frustrations of being a working mother. She and her husband, an assistant state's attorney in Cook County, have four children, ranging in age from 13 to 8. A school calendar, with weekends and summers off, seemed appealing to Cassidy after so many years at the hospital, where she often worked on weekends.